SEO Report

A Short & Effective Report

On

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

(On-Page Search Engine Optimization & On-Site

Search Engine Optimization)

Compiled by

Adesoji Adegbulu

www.makemoneyonlineng.com

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Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is the practice of optimizing both internal and

external factors of a website to ensure that its pages will rank high in search engines, thus

increasing the quantity and quality of the organic traffic.

The internal optimization can be divided in two main areas: on-page optimization, which

includes the individual elements on each web page, and on-site optimization, which includes

the structure of the website as a whole.

In this chapter, we will cover the on-page search engine optimization factors.

On-Site Search Engine Optimization 1

The Title Tag

The title tag is an HTML element that is used, as the name implies, to title web pages. It is

displayed on top of the browser when you view a web page, and it is not related with the

visual title displayed on the screen. The two can be similar and even identical, but that is not

a requirement. The title tag is the single most important on-page SEO factor, and most search

engines weight it very heavily within their algorithms.

The title tag is also used by most search engines as the title of your page in the search engine

results page (SERP), so it plays a role in the number of clicks that you will get from search

queries.

Practically speaking, an optimal title tag should:

- describe the content of the page,

- contain the main keywords of the page, and

- be appealing to human visitors.

A common question that comes into people‟s minds is how long the title tag can be. There

isn‟t a limit to how many characters you can have in your title, but search engines will only

display a certain number of them. Google, for example, truncates somewhere between 63 and

67 characters, and will truncate at the end of a word.

That does not mean you should make your titles as long as possible. In fact, the more concise

you can make them, the better.

This is because search engines will spread the algorithmic value of the title tag across all the

keywords contained in it.

The fewer keywords you use, therefore, the higher the value that each of them will receive.

Let‟s use an example to illustrate this point. Suppose you have a blog called “John Doe‟s

Blog”. The blog author then publishes a post targeting the term “how to build muscle.” One

possible and often used structure for the title tag here would be the title of the post followed

by the name of the blog:

How to Build Muscle - John Doe's Blog

The title describes the content of the post accurately, but it is not as concise as possible,

because the name of the blog is not related to the post content at all. The keywords “john”,

“doe‟s” and “blog” are therefore reducing the relevancy of the title and diluting the value

attributed to the main keywords.

A better title tag here would be just the post title:

How to Build Muscle

It is also worth noting that the first words of the title are weighted more heavily than the last

words, which is known as prominence. If you want to target a specific keyword with the

homepage of your website, therefore, the title:

Keyword to be Targeted - Domain.com

would be better than:

Domain.com - Keyword to be Targeted

The separator between the different sections of your title is not necessary, but it does

improve readability. Most publishers use a colon (:) hyphen (-) or Raquo (»). There is no

advantage to using one over the other, so just be consistent.

Ideally, you want to target one term with each page and title tag. Sometimes, however, there

are singular and plural versions of your term, and you might want to target both with the

same page. You could achieve that playing around with the phrases:

Las Vegas Vacations - Planning Your Las Vegas Vacation : Domain.com

Repeating keywords occasionally in the title tag is OK, as long as it describes the content and

makes sense for human visitors. However, be careful to not repeat keywords excessively, else

you might be flagged for keyword stuffing. Here is an example that could create problems:

Las Vegas Vacations, Discount Las Vegas Vacations, Cheap Las Vegas Vacations -

Domain.com

Finally, it‟s important that you avoid duplication of title tags throughout your website.

Ideally, each page on your website should have a unique title tag. Having the same title tag

on a few pages, while not ideal, is OK. Having the same title for most or all of your web

pages will cause problems.

Meta Tags

A meta tag is an HTML tag that resides in the <head> section of a web page. Unlike other

HTML tags, meta tags do not appear anywhere on the page itself, so most visitors never see

them. Different meta tags serve different purposes, but they are generally used to provide

additional information about the page for search robots and other applications.

Meta Keywords

The meta keywords tag is used by the search engines to determine what are the main topics

of a web page. However, due to abuse from webmasters, who would insert duplicate or

irrelevant keywords, most major search engines attribute a small weight or completely

ignore meta keywords.

Secondly, some engines consider identical or nearly identical meta keywords tags on a

website to be a signal of low quality.

This tag won‟t help a lot, but every small bit helps with SEO, so you probably should use it.

The proper format for meta keywords is:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">

Meta Description

Unlike the meta meta keyword tag, the meta description tag is still considered by most

search engines. Ideally, your meta description tag should be a short (i.e. one or two

sentences) summary of the page. Here is an example of proper format:

<meta name="description" content="A one or two sentence summary about the page goes

here.">

Most of the time search engines will show your meta description tag under the page title in

the search engine results page, adding to its importance.

In some cases, for instance when someone is doing a very specific multi-word search, search

engines will show content from the page instead of the meta description.

In other cases, search engines will show the description from the ODP (Open Directory

Project) instead of your meta description.

If no meta description exists, they will show a section of the page that contains the keywords

searched for.

Like with the title tag, each page on your website should have a unique meta description tag.

Having the same meta description tag for entire website could be very problematic. In fact

it‟s better to have no meta description tags than to have the same one across the entire site.

Meta ODP Tag

As we mentioned above, in some cases search engines will show the Open Directory Project

(also called DMOZ) description for a website instead of using it‟s meta tag. You can prevent

this by adding the following meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp">

Meta Robots

The meta robots tag has two functions: telling the search engine robots whether or not they

should index the content of the page, and telling the search engine robots whether or not

they they should follow the links they will find on it. There are two “switches” for this tag,

and each is controlled separately:

index/noindex – this tells the search engines if they should index the content of the page

follow/nofollow – this tells the search engines if they should follow links they find on the

page

Here‟s an example of how to use the meta robots tag:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

This tag will tell the search engines that they can index the page and follow the links. In

reality this is the default condition assumed by all search engines, so including it is not

necessary. This is an example of the opposite condition:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

If a search spider encountered this tag, it would not index the content of the page or follow

any of the links on the page.

It is possible to mix the settings if you desire those results, using either

<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">

or

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

Keep in mind that if the search engines find a page with the “noindex” robots tag, the URL

will still be included in the index. What won‟t be indexed is the content of the page. This

means that keyword based searches will not be able to find that page, but special site based

searches might.

No Archive Meta Tag

Usually when a search engine spider crawls and indexes a page, it keeps a cached copy stored

locally on the search engine servers. In the event of your website temporarily going down,

an end user can click on the “cached” link in the SERP and see the stored version of the page.

Similarly, the archive.org often crawls websites and make copies of their web pages, to keep

track of how they are changing over time.

In some cases, however, you may not want a cache or copy of your pages to exist. For

example, you might publish a sales page that should be available publicly only for a limited

time.

To prevent caching and archiving of your content, use the noarchive tag as follows:

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive">

Miscellaneous Meta Tags

There are several other meta tags such as “expiration date”, “author”, “revisit after” ,

“distribution” and so on. These tags are used for other purposes, and were never largely

supported by search engines.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are structural page elements that convey a hierarchy about the page. An H1 tag

is the most important one. H2 is the second most important one, followed by the H3, H4, H5

and H6. Search engines do give some weight to heading tags within a document. In most

cases, a document should only have one H1, but there is no limit to the number of H2-H6

tags that may be used. Think of them as section headings and use them to organize your

content.

Without any CSS styling, a H1 tag has the tendency to be visually overwhelming, so most

webmasters and publishers use CSS to make the documents more aesthetically appealing.

This is perfectly acceptable and within the search engine guidelines.

However hiding (with text indentation) or obfuscating (with font color equal to the

background color) heading tags is a risky tactic and should be avoided.

Main Body Content

Most modern search engines have the ability to isolate the main body of a web page from the

header, sidebars and any footer elements. As a result, the content present in the main body

receives a greater weight in the algorithms.

But how should you optimize the content that will go in the main body of your pages? Many

people have a misconception here, believing that optimized content will contain the main

keywords that you are targeting over and over again. Good SEO content should contain the

keywords you are targeting, possibly in singular, plural or stemmed version, but more

importantly it should read normally and be crafted with human visitors in mind.

If you use an unnatural pattern with your content and keywords, your page or website might

get flagged for over-optimization or even for keyword stuffing, damaging most of your search

engine rankings.

There is a simple test that you can use to make sure your content is not over-optimized.

Simply hand it to a friend who doesn‟t know anything about SEO, and ask him to read it.

Once he is done, ask what he thinks about it. If he says that the text looks a bit weird because

you are using certain keywords over and over again, then you probably should revise it.

Keyword density and keyword prominence (discussed later in this document) don‟t play a

significant role. So be sure to mention the words you are trying to rank for as naturally as

possible.

Duplicate Content

One important thing search engines look for is unique content. They don‟t want to see the

same or very similar content inside a website or across different websites.

In most cases, when search engines encounter duplicate content, they will filter out any

versions they don‟t think are the original. While this process is reasonably accurate, it‟s not

infallible. If the search engines find two URLs inside your website with similar content, for

example, they will filter one out, and it might not be the URL you want removed.

Secondly, if duplicate content is generalized inside your website, or if you are using duplicate

content to artificially increase the size of your site or to attract more organic traffic, you

might get a penalty that will affect most of your search rankings.

Page Length

There is no minimum or maximum length that you can have for a page. However, very small

pages tend to receive a low value from search engines. This is because they are less likely to

contain the information that the end user will be looking for, and because spammers often

use small pages to inflate the size of their sites. As a rule of thumb, you should aim to have at

least 200 words on your pages.

Images

Using images that are related to your content or main keywords can help with the search

engine optimization. The ALT tag inserted in your images, for example, is one of the factors

that search engines consider inside pages. Just make sure that your image ALT and TITLE

tags are not stuffed with keywords but rather describe the image correctly and briefly.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is the number of times a specific keyword appears in a page in comparison

to the total number of words. The result is expressed as a percentage. If a keyword occurs 10

times in a 400 word document, for instance, the keyword density is 2.5% (10 divided by

400). There is no magic number or golden range for keyword density. Use the word as often

as it makes sense, and use similar words to make your document read more naturally.

Keyword Prominence

Keyword prominence is a measure of how close the keyword appears to the beginning of the

text. The closer it appears, the higher the keyword prominence. The closer to the end of the

text, the lower the prominence. Again there is no magic number or golden range you should

strive for, however using it near the beginning of the copy is advisable for usability.

Bold and Italics

Having your main keywords in bold or italics can help slightly, but you should use those

where it makes sense for the readability of the document. In other words, bold or italicize

keywords where it will help the visualization of the content, and not exclusively for SEO

benefits.

Links and Anchor Text

Anchor text is the underlined clickable text of hyperlinks. When linking to other pages on

your website, try to make your anchor text as keyword rich as possible and avoid using

phrases like “click here” or “more information.”

That being said, having 100% of the internal links to a particular page using the same

optimized anchor text may not be a good idea, as it might get your site flagged for over-

optimization. Instead try use variations of the anchor text where appropriate. Additionally,

try to avoid linking to the same page two or more times inside a page with different anchor

texts, as this dilutes the value of the link.

Link out to other websites where it‟s appropriate and don‟t be concerned about “leaking” or

“bleeding” PageRank or link equity. While you probably don‟t want to put any external links

on your sales page, on informational pages it will make sense. Try to link to authoritative

documents or resources whenever possible, and avoid linking to low quality websites.

Linking to too many low quality websites may have a negative impact on your website.

Moreover, you should review existing links periodically to combat link rot (links to pages

that no longer exist or that have changed substantially and are no longer relevant).

On-Site Search Engine Optimization 2

In the previous chapter, we explained that internal search engine optimization can be

divided in two main areas: on-page optimization, which includes the individual elements on

each web page, and on-site optimization, which includes the structure of the website as a

whole.

In this chapter we will analyze factors that affect the on-site search engine optimization.

Domain Name Structure

When setting up a website, one of the first decisions you will need to make is whether or not

you will use the www. prefix. You could use either:

http://example.com

or

http://www.example.com

Under the SEO perspective, it does not matter which version you choose. The important

thing is to choose one and stick with it.

Leaving both versions active is possible, but not recommended. Google and other search

engines tend to see sub-domains as completely different websites, and www.example.com is

technically a sub-domain of the example.com website. In other words, if both the

http://example.com and the http://www.example.com versions of your website are active,

Google might see each of them as a separate website. The two websites will obviously

contain the same exact content, and as a consequence you could be penalized for duplicate

content.

Secondly, if both of your versions are active, you might end up with people linking to both

of them, which will split your backlink portfolio and reduce the overall search engine trust

that your main domain will have.

Once you have chosen the version that you want to use, therefore, you will need to redirect

the other one using a 301 Permanent Redirect. The easiest way to do this is with the

.htaccess file located in the root of your server. Simply open that file (or create one if you

don‟t have it), and paste the following code there:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Remember to substitute your own domain name there. The code above will redirect all

http://example.com requests to http://www.example.com. If you want to use the other way

around, simply invert the domains.

If you are using a PHP based CMS, like WordPress or Drupal, you can also include a PHP

code in the header of your website. The code will look like this:

<?php

if (substr($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'],0,3) != „www‟) {

header(‟HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently‟);

header(‟Location: http://www.‟.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']

.$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);

}

?>

URL

The URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, specifies where a certain resource is available.

Practically speaking, URLs are the web addresses that you use to find specific websites, pages,

and files. The structure of the URLs on your site can affect its search engine optimization,

and below we will explain how.

File Names and Folders

This is an example of a file based URL:

http://www.example.com/file.html

This is a folder based URL:

http://www.example.com/folder/

And this is an example of the two combined:

http://www.example.com/folder/file.html

In the example shown above, the file has a .html extension, which is the file type served out

by web-server (in this case a simple HTML page). There are lots of other file types, including

.php, .jsp, .asp and so on. Each of those extensions refers to the programming language used

by the web server. From a search engine perspective, there‟s no benefit to using one over the

other. If you are using custom programming on your site, you should just be careful to not

create new or unusual file extensions, as this can cause problems. An example of a maverick

file type would be:

http://example.com/file.qxra

Search engines might not understand the output of that file and they would be cautious to

list that page in the SERPs.

While there is no SEO benefit to choosing a specific file type, many site owners prefer to

follow the W3C recommendation (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) and not use file

types at all. The benefit of this approach is a higher degree of consistency. For example, if

your website is built using the ASP technology, you could serve the following page:

http://www.example.com/page.asp

Should you need to change the technology behind the site to PHP, that page will start being

served as:

http://www.example.com/file.php

The old URL would therefore become invalid, and you could also lose some backlinks. In

reality it is possible to solve such a problem with server redirects, but the process is not that

simple. A better solution is to use a simple folder based structure like this one:

http://www.example.com/file/

In this case, when the website changes from ASP to PHP, none of the URLs have to change,

and you don‟t have to maintain any backward legacy code compatibility. What‟s actually

going on behind the scenes is that the web-server is configured to display default pages for

each directory, so the real address of the page would be:

http://www.example.com/file/index.asp

However, the web-server takes care of some front end magic and serves it without needing

the “index.asp” part. The only thing that you need to care about with such structure is to

make sure that a http://www.example.com/file/index.asp request would be redirected to

http://www.example.com/file/, to avoid creating two separate pages displaying the exact

same content. Most modern content management systems handle this redirect automatically.

If your current website is using extensions, there‟s no need to change things right away.

However, when the next redesign or major platform update occurs, it might be something to

consider doing.

Word Separator

The next aspect to be concerned with is the word separator and length. If you have one or

more words in your file/folder name, you could use this configuration:

http://www.example.com/twowords/

If the words are common, well known, or frequently used, search engines can usually break

them apart and understand what is going on. If they aren‟t, however, search engines might

have a problem. If you want to make sure that words will be identified in your URL,

therefore, it is a good idea to use a separator. The most common separator is the hyphen,

which would make your URL look like this:

http://www.example.com/two-words/

In recent years search engines have improved the way they handle other separators,

including the underscore. In theory, therefore, you could also this URL:

http://example.com/two_words/

Some webmasters reported having problems with the underscore as a word separator,

though, so if you want to be on the safe side, a hyphen is probably the best choice.

Keywords in the URL

When you are building your URLs, you want to include the main keywords of the page in

question there, as this can help with the search rankings. You can also remove the

connecting words and unrelated keywords to make the URL cleaner. For example, Instead of

using:

http://www.example.com/my-best-vacation-to-las-vagas/

you could use:

http://www.example.com/vacation-las-vagas/

Just like with title tags, you want to make your URLs as concise as possible. Most search

engines also stop weighting it after the sixth or seventh word, so five or less is usually what

you should aim for.

Static URLs and URLs with Parameters

When you are building a website that has information contained in a database, there are

different ways to retrieve that information. The easiest way is by passing parameters through

a URL and making it dynamic:

http://www.example.com/file/?id=12345

While search engines have the ability to index and rank these pages, it is often desirable to

make those URLs static, by using a folder structure for example:

http://example.com/file/12345/

The programing still takes the information from the database and builds the page in the same

way, but this method facilitates the indexation. If search engines see the following URLs, for

instance:

http://example.com/file/?id=12345


they might not see them as two different pages, and therefore choose to index only one of

them.

On the other hand, search engines will always see the following URLs as separate ones:



Another advantage of static URLs is you can use them to impart a keyword component, so

instead of this:


you could have:

http://example.com/file/coffee/

As we explained before, having your main keywords in the URL is important, so try to use

static URLs whenever possible.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is an important and fairly complex aspect of building a website. In fact

entire books have been written about it. In this section we‟ll be addressing the key aspects of

it. First of all, keep in mind the following basic principles:

You want to divide your website into meaningful categories or sections.

You want an architecture that is easily crawlable and therefore not complex.

You want an architecture that is flat as opposed to deep.

You want an architecture that allows you to expand easily.

We‟ll be taking a more in depth look at each of these aspects below.

Dividing Your Website into Meaningful Sections

When you begin thinking about building your website and doing keyword research, usually

certain major topics or keyword groups emerge. These represent an efficient way to divide

your website into sections. If you have a site about cars, for example, the different sections

could be:

http://www.example.com/sport-cars/

http://www.example.com/family-cars/

http://www.example.com/luxury-cars/

Such division would be easy to understand and to navigate by your visitors.

In fact, it is important to create your internal sections with the end user in mind. Think

about the way they segment things in your market or niche, and use that same division in

your website. Sometimes businesses make the mistake of using website sections that reflect

how they see the market, and not how the end users or clients see it.

If used properly, the different sections and categories in your site will also enrich your URLs

with your main keywords.

Setting up a Crawlable Architecture

Another key aspect of your site architecture is how easily it can be crawled by the search

engines. If they can‟t discover all your internal pages easily and figure out the hierarchy that

controls them, your search rankings might suffer.

Practically speaking, all of the main sections within a website should be interconnected with

one another. Depending on the overall size of the site it may be advisable to interconnect

even the second level of the website. This has to be decided case by case.

It is also good practice to make all your internal pages link back to the homepage, and

possibly to your main sections, too.

Google suggests not having more than 100 links per page. While you can have more and

Google will still crawl them, having too many can create problems.

One of the best ways to solve crawling problems is with one or more HTML sitemaps (not to

be confused with XML sitemaps, which we will address in a different lesson). These are

nothing more than pages inside your site that will explain your site structure, with links to

all the the different sections and pages.

If you have a blog, for example, an “Archive” page containing links to all your published

posts would act as an HTML sitemap (http://www.geekwithlaptop.com/projects/clean-

archives). You could even group those posts by month, year or category. You can use the

SGR Clean Archives WordPress plugin to achieve that.

Keeping Your Architecture Flat and Not Deep

Some websites are built with too many layers or levels, and this can create problems for

search engines. As a rule of thumb, the farther a page is from the homepage, the harder it

will be for robots to find it. Suppose a website about cars has the following architecture:

http://www.example.com/cars/

http://www.example.com/cars/ford/

http://www.example.com/cars/ford/sports-car/

http://www.example.com/cars/ford/sports-car/mustang/

This is an example of a deep website architecture, which is inefficient. A search robot would

need to go through three levels of sub-folders to find the Mustang page, so it could have

problems to find and index it.

Ideally, you want to create a single page about the Mustang sitting at the top level like this:

http://www.example.com/cars/mustang/

Then you can link to the mustang page from each of these sub pages:

http://www.example.com/cars/ford/

http://www.example.com/cars/sports-car/

A secondary benefit of this flat structure is that if you decide to remove one of the sub-

folders, say the “sports car” one, you won‟t need to 301 redirect the Mustang page and every

other sub page underneath that folder.

Setting up Your Architecture to Allow for Expansion

Another key mistake many people make when setting up a site architecture is not leaving

themselves room for future expansion. To continue with our example of a car website, every

year there will be new cars, so you would need to accommodate that. An architecture that

wasn‟t optimized for the future would look like this:

http://www.example.com/cars/2008/mustang/



With such a structure, every year the site owner would have to build new links to the new

Mustang page to get it ranking well. A more efficient architecture for that situation would

be:

http://www.example.com/cars/mustang/2008/



By adding the year as a sub-folder to the Mustang page you can keep any links and rankings

from the main Mustang page and share them with the other pages. Secondly, any users who

happen to come to the page looking for an older version will easily be able to reach it.

Now that you have successfully read through this report on SEO, I believe that you would go

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Kind Regards,

Adesoji Adegbulu

Owner – Make Money Online Nigeria



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